Check out Anya Bast and Lauren Dane's contest -- they're giving away a nook. As well as a book a day from each of them. Great writers, nifty high-tech toy... what's not to love?

Honeybear was somewhat distressed going into the movie, having heard that the science was laughable, making it not very good science fiction. Having seen the movie, however, he came to the realization that great science fiction doesn't have to be ABOUT the science. (He's a hard sf guy, so this was a rather shocking realization for him.)

The movie even admits as much, calling the rare mineral they're searching for "unobtainium". Like, hello, yes, this is our McGuffin, move on. They're far more interested in exploring the relationship of industry, military, and science.

We saw it last night in IMAX 3D. And all I can say is, WOW. Go, see this movie. See it in IMAX if you can. Definitely see it in IMAX 3D if possible.

The movie was so great, it was almost enough to make me forget the retina-burning preview of Paranha 3D. Almost. Did no one learn from Jaws 3D??? When the guy picked up the rotary saw and brandished it so it jumped from the screen, it was like a bad 70's flashback.

Wheee! Despite pbray assuring me she had no brain, she whomped me at Quiddler last night. I got my revenge tonight. We played Scrabble, and she, my mom, and my dad all tied at exactly 117 points. I scored 292 (or thereabouts). Hitting a triple-letter used twice for an X (AX and OX), a double word for a Q (QUIT), and being able to use all seven of my letters (to make TWISTED) were all very good things. My inability to spell (trying, at various times, to make GAGED and REQUIUM) was a slightly less good thing.

We also stopped by Flights of Fantasy today, and picked up a game for Honeybear's birthday, and for jpsorrow's Christmas present.

Plus, I ordered two games from Days of Wonder (a Ticket to Ride expansion and Pirate's Cove), which entitled me to their Christmas bonus of a free game of Marklin Ticket to Ride. Woot! (Someone at our Monday night gaming group recommended playing it without the passengers/cargo rules, as a straight game of trains, so we will probably do that.)

I seem to naturally gravitate to worriers ... Honeybear is a worrier, and pbray is a championship worrier. I can sort of kind of if I squint understand that mindset. Not for me, but I can see where it might be a useful survival skill. (My skill, obviously, is in finding people to do my worrying for me.)

But what I'll never understand is miserable people. The ones that, no matter what wonderful thing is going on in their lives, are miserable about it.

To illustrate this, I'll give you an example. This weekend, we were going to go to a Star Trek party. It was cancelled due to weather. (The host lives WAAAAAY up in the mountains, and you seriously don't want to drive those roads if it's not warm and dry.) So Honeybear thought he could go visit his godson instead.

This made me sad, because in my mind, I'd been thinking that we'd be spending time together, doing something fun. It didn't matter that the substitute activity for the party was cleaning and organizing bookshelves. It would be fun, because we'd be doing it together.

I did not like feeling sad. So I thought, Why am I sad? Because I have this wonderful husband, and I don't get to spend the whole day with him. Which, when you really look at it, means that we love each other so much, and have so much fun with each other, that we're eager to spend our free time with each other, even though we both work from home and see each other all the time.

I came downstairs, and Honeybear looked at me quizzically. "You look happy," he said.

I glowed at him. "I am. Because I love you, and you love me, and we love having fun together, and what could be better than that?" And then I gave him a super-big spine-cracking hug.

After he was gone, I discovered a whole bunch of NEW BOOKS I hadn't read yet while organizing the book shelves. One of which I took the opportunity of his absence to read, and it was wonderful.

So, yeah... I really just don't get people who choose to be miserable.

In an effort to spur interest in older anthology titles, EC is re-releasing the individual stories (with totally rocking new covers!) as e-books. (The anthologies will remain anthologies for print.)

Here are the 2010 release dates for my stories:

Life Sentence – 1/8/10
South Beach Submissive – 2/3/10
Must Love Music – 3/24/10
Dancing in the Dark – 4/19/10

Another adorable cat picture. Here's Phoebe, having claimed a shopping bag that fell to the kitchen floor for her own.

It's time for Kittypic spam! Four adorable photos of the Phoebester. First, her royal highness enthroned on Honeybear's suitcase, when we got back from our honeymoon. We weren't getting away again without her! Next, two shots of her Halloween costume, as an Egyptian. And finally, Stealth Cat, hiding in the mail bag (the conference souvenir used to collect the mail from the development mail station).

Click on any of the images to see the full-size photo.

Totally awesome video lecture about synthesizing happiness, and how we all automatically do it... as well as set ourselves up to synthesize misery, since we don't understand how it works. Good stuff!

The invitations have just gone out for the home-from-the-honeymoon party for Colorado friends and family who couldn't make it to NY for the wedding.

We'd been tossing around ideas, and had pretty much settled on the extremely low-effort idea of renting a room at the Rec Center for 3 hours, bringing in cake, soda, and pizza, and showing off pictures of the wedding and honeymoon while people ate. This would have cost somewhere between $150 and $200.

Now, after the totally AWESOME wedding, we were feeling a little glum about having such a lame after-party for the CO folks. But we really didn't know what else to do. And we were totally burned out on party planning from the wedding and reception.

Enter my phenomenal luck. We got a call from Wit's End, a local comedy club that we've visited two or three times in the past (they book some seriously funny people, the AAA minor-league of comedians who are right on the edge of being called up to the majors, or major leaguers who haven't yet become star players). Anyhow, one of the times we'd visited, I'd entered their drawing for free tickets. They were calling to tell us we'd won the grand prize, of not just tickets for us, but tickets for us and our 48 closest friends.

All right! Change of plans. The after-party is now being held at the Wit's End Comedy Club. Our guests arrive at 7pm, we show pictures of the wedding/honeymoon, then the show starts at 8pm, and everyone has a hilariously good time. Woot!

Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek) has an interview with The Young Turks up on YouTube. She talks about a lot of interesting things (did you know Dr. Martin Luther King was a Trekker? or that she dated Gene Roddenberry for a while?) but her main reason for being on the show is to promote The Torturer, the movie for which Honeybear was an Executive Producer, and which was written/directed by the best man at our wedding. There are some awesome movie clips in the interview.

This was her second interview. The first one, on the Mike Malloy show, the host basically begged his listeners to watch the movie, it was that impactful.

The movie will be available on video October 20, from all standard movie rental/sale locations.

The first 600 or so honeymoon photos have been loaded to Snapfish. I spent two hours captioning them, then evil evil snapfish ate the captions and replaced them all with "untitled". [ETA: The captions for the first half were recovered, having still been saved in the browser. Nice, nice Firefox.] So, sorry, you have no idea what you're looking at [ETA after the Montserrat Monastery trip]. I'll re-caption them again, at some point. But probably not any time soon.

So, I'm trying to come up with an even dozen virtues. Have you ever noticed how virtues tend to overlap? It's really hard to come up with 12 distinct ones, without making some of them totally lame.

Oh, and just to make things more difficult, all of them have to be demonstrable. :-)

These are the 12 I came up with. Do you see any major ones I've forgotten? Any over-arching ones that these could be further rolled up into?

Truth
Compassion
Belief
Connection
Passion
Nurturing
Joy
Reverence
Reliability
Innocence
Strength
Hope

The professional wedding photos are available online at: johnwhipple.lifepics.com/net/Pro/Default.aspx
Use event code: DunneKolber

You'll need to create a userid, but it's free. The photographer just wants to know who's looking at the pictures.

But here's a classic you all need to see -- the Vulcan wedding party.



The people in photo, by the way, are my dad, mom, me, Honeybear, pbray, and my brother. For some reason, the best man and other bridesmaid aren't in this shot. I guess it was when we were doing the family photos.

I'm back from my honeymoon! Yea! There will be photos, just as soon as we can get them uploaded from Honeybear's thinkpad. (Yes, he took his computer with him on the honeymoon. He didn't work, though -- he played Spore.)

( Amusing travel adventures )

Since Honeybear was lifting and moving most of the luggage, he ended up hurting HIS wrist, too. Which means our bags are still sitting in the middle of the living room floor, and no laundry has been done. I also needed 2 chiropractor visits -- apparently, with all the lifting and carrying, I'd managed to jam my left leg bone up into the pelvic socket, and it needed to be pulled out with a really loud POP. Then a second visit to nudge the vertebrae back into an upright and vertical position after the muscles had a few days to adapt to the new position of the leg. So, even though my wrist was better, I wasn't doing any lifting, either.

So what did we do instead of unpacking? We went to the movies! We saw "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" which was a truly DELIGHTFUL movie, with lots of depth. It's basically an exploration of parent/child relationships and being true to your inner nerd, with social commentary about respect for the environment and rampant consumerism, using the "local boy makes good" scenario. And, yeah, food falls from the sky. But that's not what the movie's ABOUT.

Also, we've been watching premiers of new shows on TV. We just watched the pilot episode of Eastwick (TV show based on The Witches of Eastwick) and loved it. But there was a moment when the devil arrived, and I thought, "I know that actor... he played one of the good guys... a really good guy... was he one of the supermans?... ZOMG! It's Benton Frasier! From Due South!!!" Who plays an exceedingly polite and law-abiding (for a somewhat strange definition of "law") prince of darkness. And takes his clothes off. A lot. The pilot's available online for those of you who missed it.

Yea! After like a year and a half of planning, I'm actually married!

And in Rome!

On a honeymoon!

Which explains why I'm surfing the 'net. :-) Not. (Actually, Honeybear was checking to see when we were scheduled to meet our tour guide tomorrow morning, and I grabbed the laptop when he was done. He's snoring peacefully against my leg... apparently my calf is more comfortable than the pillow.)

Some quick trivia:
Why I called it a plague wedding: Maid of honor sick, running fever; guests cancelling because of flu, stomach bug, respiratory issues, and emergency surgeries; caterer hospitalized with a gallbladder attack; and dj a noshow because of shingles. (Both supplied replacements.)

The best man's toast was so well received that he's thinking of starting a service to ghost write best man toasts.

Guest who traveled the farthest: a college friend came from Chile. He lives in Massachusetts. But he cut short a business trip to Chile so he could get here for the wedding.

Pictures (and possibly video) to follow in like a month. :-)

One of the fun things to do with cruises is to pick out shore excursions. These are the ones we picked for the first leg of our honeymoon cruise, the western Meditteranean.

LIVORNO
Medieval Siena, San Gimgnano & Wine Tasting (Departs 7:30AM)( details )

MONTE CARLO
Nice & Eze (Departs 9:15AM)( details )

BARCELONA
Montserrat Monastery (Departs 8:00AM) ( details )

PALMA DE MALLORCA
Palma by Bicycle (Departs 10:00AM)( details )

LA GOULETTE
Sidi Bou Said & Carthage (Departs 9:15AM)( details )

NAPLES
Ancient Herculaneum (Departs 9:00AM)( details )

There's also going to be one day of looking at a picturesque village and touring a Norman cathedral, but we haven't decided exactly which village/cathedral.

The choices are Cefaly or Monreale.

( Cefaly )

( Monreale )

We're going with "books" as the theme of our wedding reception -- an open book cake topper, pile of books for centerpieces, bookmarks for favors -- and wanted the reception menu and table numbers to also be bookish.

I found some royalty-free high-quality photos of open books, and was able to transform them (using GIMP, the free image editor) into the perfect book-themed decorations.

Check them out!

Hmmm.... two dogs sharing a bone or two bunnies sharing a carrot.

Or, looked at another way, the foot of a clawed dinosaur creature that just stomped something into grease. ;-)

We've seen a lot of movies, lately. Videos from RedBox, FINALLY the new Harry Potter, and the new Adam Sandler movie to cheer me up after working 8am-1am Monday followed 8am-9pm Tuesday. Here's a rundown.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in IMAX 3D.
What is the point of having the first 10-15 minutes of the movie in 3D? So you can have a 3D trip through Diagon Alley? Big whoop! I saw those same 10-15 minutes in regular format (see previous post regarding spectacular failure to execute our first attempt to see this film) and there was no difference in impact. Overall, the film felt a lot like HP#1 -- faithful to the book, and displaying scenes that were important, but never quite hanging together as a movie. And what was with the visual motif of birds? Maybe if Harry had been struggling with being the chosen one, and wanting to be free of his destiny, that would make sense, but as it was, it was just annoying.

Funny People
This latest offering by Adam Sandler was awesome. Very funny. (Not non-stop laughfest, but fairly steady laugh-out-loud moments) Including a number of jokes about the sort of stupid movies a comedian ends up making. But more importantly, it was a wonderful character study, all about what's really important in life. Honeybear declared it that rarest of Hollywood things, a truly original comedy.

He's Just Not That Into You
...or some variation on that title. This was a DVD choice that we thought would be innocuous fluff. Instead, we ended up watching it with one hand on the remote, pausing to discuss after every revelation or turning point (of which there were MANY). We discussed how the writers had led our expectations one way, but how what we'd later seen made us reinterpret those earlier interactions in a new light. We discussed our hopes for the characters, and how we wanted them to end up. It took us nearly 4 hours to watch the film. :-) But we really, really enjoyed it. One insight -- all of the characters were honestly likeable, and we wanted them to succeed and find love, unlike the common Hollywood 20-something, that is too self-important and convinced of their own superiority.

Yes Man
A Jim Carrey offering, also from RedBox, that was a big skip for me at the theater because the trailer made it seem so stupid. A guy says "Yes" to everything, and ends up doing a bunch of really stupid stuff. But, just like the Funny People trailers, the trailers were aimed at the teenaged boy market, and totally missed the whole point of the film. It's about being open to life, to taking chances, and to finding the good in everything. And when it matters, knowing when to say "No." Very powerful film.

We've been shuffling around travel reservations -- deciding to make the return flight from Albany instead of NYC so we can leave a bunch of stuff with my parents (like the wedding gown and IBM laptop) rather than have to cart it over to Europe with us, or try to ship it back to Colorado when there's not going to be anyone to receive it.

It's like we're trying to hit every variety of transport possible. :-)

We fly to Albany. Take a shuttle bus to Newark. Fly to Rome. Take a taxi to the port. Board a cruise ship. (Shore excursions may include other vehicles, such as catamarans and scenic small-gauge trains.) Repeat in reverse to get back to Newark. Take a shuttle train to Penn Station, then AmTrak to Rensselaer. Parents pick us up in a car, then take us to the airport the next day for our flight home.

I just booked the hotel in Rome. We'll be there for two days. Honeybear's sister was just in Rome, and suggested a luxury hotel that they really enjoyed, for 140 Euros a night. This hotel is about a block away, even more luxurious, includes a full American breakfast buffet (why is it you get American breakfast buffets on the continent, and Continental breakfast buffets in America?), and is only 135 Euros a night.

I suppose I should buy a guidebook to Rome, since we'll have a day and a half to be busy tourists.